The study of moral emotions (i.e. Schadenfreude and envy) is critical to understand the ecological complexity of everyday interactions between cognitive, affective, and social cognition processes. Most previous studies in this area have used correlational imaging techniques and framed Schadenfreude and envy as unified and monolithic emotional domains. Here, we profit from a relevant neurodegene...

This book is a prolegomenon to a study of human virtues in their connections with emotions and related affective / motivational states. Accordingly, it is a contribution to the broad and diverse field of “ethics,” in particular to the subfield sometimes known as “moral psychology.” Initiated (or rather, revived) fifty years ago by Elizabeth Anscombe’s “Modern Moral Philosophy” (1958) and given ...

In this chapter we raise some of the moral issues involved in the current development of robotic autonomous agents. Starting from the connection between autonomy and responsibility, we distinguish two sorts of problems: those having to do with guaranteeing that the behavior of the artificial cognitive system is going to fall within the area of the permissible, and those having to do with endowi...

We may experience strong moral outrage when we read a news headline that describes a prohibited action, but when we gain additional information by reading the main news story, do our emotional experiences change at all, and if they do in what way do they change? In a single online study with 80 participants the aim was to examine the extent to which emotional experiences (disgust, anger) and mo...

Emotions and feelings are now considered as decisive in the human intelligent decision process. In particular, social emotions would help us to enhance the group and cooperate. It is still a matter of debate the what that motivates biological creatures to cooperate or not with their group. Would all kinds of cooperation hide a selfish interest, or would it exist truly altruism? If we pore over ...

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of moral emotions (guilt/innocence) on decisions under risk. We hypothesize that participants’ aversion to risky choices and preference for risky choices vary as a function of their moral role (guilty/innocent), and thus of moral assumptions, rather than only in view of the gain–loss formulation effects (Tversky & Kahneman, 1981). The effect of...

Recent research suggests that emotions can have a central role in decision making in a number of contexts. These contexts range from work tasks and moral behaviour (e.g. Baumeister, Stillwell & Heatherton, 1994), social judgements and social behaviour (e.g. Forgas, 2000) to consumption (e.g. Lerner, Small, & Lowenstein, 2004). The context of ethical consumption – defined as consumption that ent...

Actual behaviour is influenced in important ways by moral emotions, for instance guilt or shame (see among others Tangney et al., 2007). Beliefdependant models of social preferences using the framework of psychological games aim to consider such emotions to explain other-regarding behaviour. Our study links recent advances in psychological theory on moral emotions to belief-dependant models in ...

In recent years, moral psychology has undergone a renaissance characterized by two dramatic changes (Haidt, 2007). First, the scientific study of morality has become a broad, interdisciplinary enterprise, drawing on insights and methods from philosophy, neuroscience, economics, anthropology, biology, and all quarters of psychology. Second, emotion now plays a central role in moral psychology re...